Books, food, friends, and Virginia Woolf.
"I spare you the twists and turns of my cogitations, for no conclusion was found on the road to Headingly, and I ask you to suppose that I soon found out my mistake about the turning and retraced my steps to Fernham."--Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Where I’ve been…

I had a bunch of October 1 deadlines and, miraculously, met nearly all of them because I wanted to be free to celebrate my birthday. So, I worked like a bee the whole last week of September, anticipating Friday the 29th.

I turned forty.

That’s very hard to believe.

But the shock was significantly leavened by the surprise arrival of my parents from Seattle. The popped in to the bar at the Algonquin on Friday night and we moved from there on to dinner at Per Se. That, in fact, had been my fantasy of the perfect fortieth birthday—dinner with my parents and my husband at Per Se. I am still reeling from the strange, thrilling pleasure of having a fantasy come true. My husband engineered it--wow!

Those October 1 deadlines don’t slow down the blogging while I’m working—writing a quick blog entry is often a good way to keep me at my desk even if I cannot still work on the task at hand. But the orgy of work followed by the shock of a new decade, accompanied all the while by the demands of the gorgeous, funny, demanding daughters, and leavened by all kinds of treats from my husband and my own parents made the next week one in which I couldn’t really get to Fernham. There has been a lot of eating (more foie gras!) and a lot of reading in the intervening time. I look forward to sorting it all out in prose in the coming days…